Olga Alieva Took Part in XI Symposium Platonicum

Olga Alieva, Lecturer at the School of Philosophy, presented a report at the 11th Symposium Platonicum that was held on July 4-8, 2016 in Brasilia. The event was organized by the International Plato Society.

The International Plato Society was established in 1989. Since then, every three years the society has organized a symposium, bringing together leading experts in Plato from around the world. Each symposium is dedicated to a Platonic dialogue. The topic of the latest event was ‘Phaedo’, and over 100 reports were presented at the conference.

Olga Alieva spoke on ‘How Plato Saved Pleasures for Philosophy’. The report was dedicated to the theory of pleasure by Plato in the context of the controversy with the Pythagoreans. This project is a result of the work on the seminar on slow reading of the original dialogue ‘Phaedo’, led by Olga Alieva in 2015-2016. Another seminar on this will be held in the new academic year.

Tom Robinson, IPS Vice-President, said that one of the society’s interim meetings may be held in St. Petersburg with the help of the Plato Philosophical Society, headed by Roman Svetlov.

A change of theme for the 20th Symposium,to be held in Paris in 2019, was also announced. The participants decided to choose the dialogue ‘Parmenides’, translated into French by Luc Brisson (CNRS), instead of the previously planned ‘Sophist’. The symposium on ‘Sophist’ will instead be held in Athens, Georgia, US, in 2022.

As at the meeting on Plato’s ‘Symposium’, which was held in Pisa in 2013, Olga Alieva was the only Russian participant. Her report "Ἔρως προτρέπων: Philosophy and Seduction in the Symposium" was selected for publication in the conference proceedings published by Academia Verlag in the series ‘International Plato Studies’. This collection was issued in summer 2016.